During a recent stay in London, my wife and I took an early evening stroll down Lamb’s Conduit Street, in the West End district of Bloomsbury, a mere 15-minute walk from the din of Piccadilly Circus but a world away: peaceful, elegant, a medley of quaint shops and stately houses, tucked amid which was a restaurant called Noble Rot. We sat at a table. The atmosphere was convivial, the food delicious, the wine exquisitely paired. On the bar counter were copies of a small but thick magazine, also called Noble Rot, adorned with a bright hipster-cartoon cover. Out of curiosity, I bought one—and, as sometimes happens in random moments, my take on a whole slice of life began to change.
In this case, what changed was my attitude toward wine and its seriously playful possibilities. Flip through the establishment wine magazines, and you’re presented with august pronouncements, the vintages under review awarded numerical ratings, the accompanying text instructing you what flavors and aromas to expect when you open a bottle—and which of these sensations to value more or less than others.
By contrast, open up Noble Rot, and you’re instantly smacked with a more jovial vibe: Come on in and join the party! The writers, who include food and wine specialists as well as occasional celebrities—including the actress Keira Knightley, who turns out to have a wicked pen and a fine palate—are extremely well-informed, evocative, funny, and, above all, curious.
In the issue that I bought that night, No. 34, the editor’s opening piece begins, “It doesn’t take an ancient Greek philosopher to recognize that the more you learn about wine, the more you know you don’t know.” (I can’t imagine Wine Enthusiast publishing that sentence.) This was by way of introducing an essay about the great wines of Switzerland—a tough subject, as Swiss vintners export just 1 percent of their output. So, the editor set off to explore the country’s “spectacular mountainside vineyards,” sat for long, sloshy conversations with the beyond-obscure “Alpine masters,” and reported back every detail.
The piece on Swiss wine, it turned out, was an outlier; the magazine sticks mainly to the oenophile’s standard map of Europe: France, Italy, Spain, Greece. But even there, it focuses on small, little-known wineries, many of them run by a single person.
In a recent Zoom conversation, the editor of Noble Rot, Dan Keeling, described the typical operator of such vineyards as “an obsessive, a dreamer” who “makes hundreds, maybe thousands of decisions”—about treating the soil, adjusting to the weather, calibrating the tannins, determining when to pick the grapes, and figuring out how to store them, to name just a few—“and they all add up to the final thing,” which, with any luck, might be magic.
In his own evolution as a writer and editor, as well as a purveyor and lover of these wines, Keeling has also become an obsessive and a dreamer. And one clear aim of Noble Rot is to entice readers into becoming obsessives and dreamers too.
The striking, delightful thing is the combination of thorough expertise, ardent passion, and esoteric subject matter—or, rather, the delving into an esoteric branch of a common subject, the sense that we’re being let in on a secret, a hidden cellar, that most people, even those who know something about wine, don’t know exists. Keeling also co-authored a book, Noble Rot: Wine From Another Galaxy—a title that captures the fizz of a strange adventure. (A sequel is coming out in November, Who’s Afraid of Romanée-Conti? A Shortcut to Drinking Great Wines.)
A couple of decades ago, Keeling, who is now 49, was the managing director of Island Records. (He signed Coldplay, among other pop bands.) There was a wine shop, run by a musician friend, just down the street from his studio. Keeling would sometimes go in and ask for a bottle costing 15 pounds or less. “Like many people, I felt vulnerable in there,” he recalled. “I thought wine was a bit of swiz. I didn’t know anything, figured there couldn’t be much difference between a 15-pound bottle and a 50-pound bottle.”
Then, one of the shop’s employees, Mark Andrew, started holding tastings in the basement. “He’d bring in these amazing artisanal wines,” Keeling said. “They were inconsistent, but when they were good, they were really, really, really good.”
The big moment came when they tasted a 2005 Ridge “Lytton Springs.” “It had this vivid blueberry flavor” like a lot of California zinfandels, “but it was also savory,” he remembered. “It was this complexity, the balance between the two, that brought the wine to life—I’d never tasted that before.”
He drew a comparison with his first love, music: “All great music has at least two different emotions at play at the same time. What makes Kate Bush’s ‘Running Up That Hill’ endlessly fascinating is its combination of joyful defiance with melancholic resignation.”
Andrew, the tasting coordinator, was a year ahead of Keeling on the path to a dreamy obsession with wine, so they became friends and set out exploring more intensely. In 2013 they started the magazine, mainly because no other publication was writing about wine the way they and their friends talked about it.
“We didn’t know what we were doing, but that didn’t stop us,” he recalled. They took a class from the Guardian on how to start a magazine. They found a few designers to scribble the artwork, modeled their style on the DIY look of Jockey Slut, an indie music mag of the day, and printed 1,000 copies of their first issue, under the legend “Wine Music Food Life.” (The phrase noble rot refers to a fungus deliberately injected into some types of grapes to make the resulting wine much sweeter. Keeling adapted it, saying, “We just loved the contrast of the words, in the tradition of many great artists—the Stone Roses, Happy Mondays, Fatboy Slim, etc.”)
A key model for the magazine was an American, Kermit Lynch, who had started a wine import business, specializing mainly in French wines, back in the 1980s, when you could barely give away the stuff. (He is now one of the two biggest U.S. wine importers.) Lynch wrote a lively memoir, Adventures on the Wine Route, and a collection of his monthly newsletters, summarizing his latest offerings, called Inspiring Thirst. Keeling devoured, and continues to dip into, both books. “What I loved about his writing,” he said, “is it’s very knowledgeable, very opinionated, but he also has a sense of humor.”
Lynch, whom I reached in Bandol, France, where he spends half the year (the other half he’s in Berkeley), is in turn a big fan of Noble Rot, saying, “I like their punk attitude,” which, even at age 82, he intends as a high compliment.
As the magazine found its audience, Keeling and Andrew opened their wine bar and restaurant, then started a retail wine shop (called Shrine to the Vine) and an import firm (Keeling Andrew & Co.). The magazine, unlike the big glossies, carries no ads—a choice that allows editorial independence. However, a skeptic might wonder if the publication’s articles serve as advertisements for the pair’s commercial enterprises.
Keeling understood the question but waved it away. “I would not write about any wine that I wouldn’t want to drink myself,” he said. “I’m just a wine lover. These are the best wines I can find; these are the wines we want to have in our cellar. We could make more money by taking ads or selling the more commercial wines, but life’s too short for that.”
What’s it all about, then? What drives the likes of Keeling, Andrew, and Lynch to spend vast sums, in some cases hundreds of dollars, for a single bottle of crushed grapes—“noble rot,” so to speak—that provides, even in its best incarnations, a fleeting experience?
Keeling acknowledges this “barrier to entry,” the high prices, as “one of the things I don’t like about really good wine.” He quickly added, “If you want to go see Taylor Swift and don’t know somebody, I don’t know how much that’s going to cost. Think of this like going to see the best gig you’ve ever seen in your life.”
He chuckled, then added, “What can I say? I’m a thrill-seeker. This particular thrill, of wine, comes with history, culture, geography, local traditions, people’s stories. Stories are a massive part of it—the greatest evenings spent with friends who are really focused on wine, telling a story about Chatêau Hermitage. The greatest wines take us out of ourselves. Some of these vineyards, some of these wines, have this visceral energy. That’s what we’re chasing after.”
In an email after our conversation, I asked Keeling for a short list of wines he could recommend that cost less than $30 a bottle. He suggested the following:
Thymiopoulos Xinomavro “Jeunes Vignes” 2022
San Lorenzo Verdicchio “Le Oche” 2022
Juan Antonio Ponce “La Casilla” 2021
Lustau “3 en Rama” Manzanilla de Sanlúcar NV
Ca’dï Press Dolcetto d’Alba 2022
I bought a bottle of the first wine, a dry Greek red, at a nearby wine shop for $21 and drank it with dinner that night. It was fresh and fruity going in, with a hint of spiciness on the way down—one of the best low-priced wines I’ve ever had.
